Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow? 812
Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
The Internet isn't slow.. (Score:5, Insightful)
just the journalists who try to write about it.
Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have on occasion used Firefox plugins that filter out most banner ads. I've found my pages load about 70% faster. I watch the little status line at the bottom of Firefox and I've found that most of my "waiting" time is for advertisements.
I've also found DNS to be slow for some reason. Things that aren't cached on the local machine slow browsing down significantly (something else adverts contribute to).
Of course the people who just leave P2P applications running non-stop are a bit of a pain.
I have no idea what they're talking about (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this a US phenomenon? My Internet seems to be pretty much as fast as always and I don't do filesharing. The reason Granny waits for her webpages is because she still uses dial-up and webpages have become increasingly dial-up unfriendly.
What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Incompetence from ISPs (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's not ok to do so when there're plenty of people in the likes of France, South Korea, Japan and Hogn Kong who're already having 100Mbps+ at home, at a much cheaper price, and not-so-clogged up.
Slow websites (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, it's more because website designers still haven't figured out how to make compact, fast-loading websites. They swear by flash, while we swear at it. They forget to set content expiry properly so your browser reloads all their little images every time you revisit their site (yes Greg Dean of Real Life Comics, I'm looking at you). They consider their site to be "unfinished" if its frontpage is below 500 kbyte.
That site mentioned in the article, ancestry.com, has 59,6 kbyte of HTML, 56,99 kbyte of CSS, 64,88 kbyte of images and a whopping 314,39 kbyte of scripts, totalling 495,91 kbyte. And most of the non-image content isn't even compressed! No wonder it's slow.
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:5, Insightful)
The other thing that does delay websites is when their front page is a multi-megabyte FLASH. What's wrong with good ole plain text, guys?
It's the market (Score:4, Insightful)
If the premise of the article is right let's cut the Internet connections of that 5% of power users. We end up using only 50% of the available bandwidth and ISP paying more than they should. I bet that they'll quickly sell the unused bandwidth (it's called cost reduction and profit maximization) and poor granny will start waiting for Ancestry.com again.
The Internet will never be fast because ISPs will give us no more than what we need to use it in a more or less acceptable way.
By the way, how it comes that poor granny's connection is slow while power users play WoW without problems?
Games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are they just something that the aforementioned Granny doesn't do, and therefore probably antisocial?
Re:Yeah! (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, ISPs sell more bandwidth than they can cover because they assume you will only use 5% of what you pay for.
I know why they do that, but hey, a little more headroom wouldn't hurt. If a few saturated consumer connections can make your entire net sluggish, you are cutting it too close.
Besides size, many sites are "Slow" today... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Granny still uses dial-up (Score:1, Insightful)
The reason Granny waits for her webpages is because she still uses dial-up
The reason Granny still uses dial-up is because the broadband providers haven't reached her house yet. Instead of spending money on rolling copper or fiber into less-urban areas, the providers are spending all their spare money on backbone transit for bandwidth-hogging customers' packets.
Scapegoat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can be pretty damn sure the contracts are so onesided the company isn't required to really do anything.
Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course. That 'granny' is often in a less dense, or poorer, neighborhood. Why spend money there when spending the same investment in a customer dense, higher income neighborhood gets a lot more services purchased with a lot more margin for profit? Even for DSL, which requires only network setup at the Telco offices, if the homes are further away from the switching office the customers will get much less bandwidth.
That backbone transit is not only for the home customers, it's for the serious business customers. Take a good look at the bandwidth costs for your workplace: it's not cheap.
Oh man, poor Granny (Score:5, Insightful)
She's being victimized by the file traders! And we, the ISPs, are powerless to help! If only there were some way to make Granny's internet connection higher priority. Some kind of . . . service quality protocol. Quality of Service, perhaps. We could call it that. But no such thing exists, of course, because if it did, we'd be using it by now. And we aren't. So.
But even if it did, it would rely on web traffic being easily recognizable. And it isn't! It's not like virtually all web traffic goes through a specific "port" or anything. And it's not like HTTP connections are easy to check for and flag as "higher priority". The technology *just doesn't exist*, and can never be developed. Ever.
And even if that all existed, well, of course it would be impossible to implement it! For reasons I don't feel like explaining right now. Just trust me. And I suppose we *could* just buy more bandwidth but, whoops, that takes too much money! Money which we've spent on . . . uh, we just don't have it. That's right. We don't have it. It's . . . I think someone else has it. Ask them. I guess, instead of solving the problem, we'll just have to whine at the lawmakers until they prop up our badly-designed business. Wait that's not right. Let me try that again. We'll have to complain in news articles and attempt to villainize our customers who foolishly took our contracts as contracts. No, no, no, that's not right at all. Man I just can't think of the proper solution right now.
Well, to make a long story short, we're too cheap to solve the problem QUICK LOOK OVER THERE it's an elderly person who's being inconvenienced by those damn hoodlums again! Think of your grandmother!
Population densities... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up (Score:2, Insightful)
bullshit.
they don't roll it out to less-densely-populated areas because it takes much longer to recoup the money they put out. it's not cost-effective, so it doesn't happen.
what isp do you work for?
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, duh. If they built 100 times the bandwidth and it was still flat-fee, use-as-much-as-you-like then... guess what... people will use as much as they like. If bandwidth is a scarce resource then just charge people per gigabit of data sent and received. Or arrange that the first N gigabits of data you transfer each day are high-priority, with priority dropping off (relative to other users of the same ISP) as you use more and more.
Re:Population densities... (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the population density of your neighborhood? I ask because Alaska doesn't really make it harder to service you (nor do Texas, Arizona, Nevada, ...).
Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up (Score:1, Insightful)
Not true. My sister has 10mb fiber to her door, and she wouldn't have it UNLESS I had told her to have it. Granny will tell you, "I just send and read e-mail, honey. I don't NEED anything that fast".
People don't have broadband because they don't want to pay $40 a month for Internet.
Why is Slashdot so slow? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Net neutrality would mean that there should be no prioritising of traffic by content provider: i.e. you should not slow down some websites, to speed others up.
The idea is to prevent anti-competitive, anti-consumer choice agreements between telcos and other big companies that squeeze everyone else out.
I see no problem with providing different service levels to different end users. It already happens, and I have never heard of anyone finding it objectionable.
I doubt many people have a problem with charging per gigabyte either.
Re:I have no idea what they're talking about (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a problem with charging per gigabyte. The thing is its very ambiguous how much gigabytes you're using. Theres nothing like an odometer to measure you're overall useage of bandwidth.
These ISPs are SERIOUSLY overselling their network capacity to create an artificial scarcity. I would not be surprised if the number was upwards of 100 (or even 1000) (Customers):1 Unit of Bandwidth. I suspect as much as 10 years ago that the number might have been something more sane like 10 (Customer):1 Unit of Bandwidth. Since no customers (except Bittorrent users) are going to be using their full allotment 24/7. Even at 10:1 you're gonna have many more 'mom and pop' types who just browse email and the web a few times a day for every hardcore 23 hours a day WoW addict that downloads videos of their favorite TV show off bittorrent.
In other words they're being greedy and their own actions (overselling) are creating the artificial scarcity which they are benefiting from by being able to go from 'buffet style billing' to 'individual item billing'.
Re:Games? (Score:1, Insightful)
Have online games started using large amounts of bandwidth (instead of trying to minimise traffic in the interests of latency) since I last played a new game?
No, if you measure online games they use very little bandwidth it would not make sense for them to use a lot.
What annoys the ISPs about online gamers is that they demand quality of connection for their internet and obviously the ISPs do not want to provide that either.
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's troubling how many people will blindly recommend OpenDNS without understanding the huge problems with that service. Stay far, far away from OpenDNS - that is, unless you just don't care that they redirect all your Google queries through their own servers:
Or that they break with acceptable DNS behavior by sending you to their own advertising web server, rather than return a NXDOMAIN response, when a name cannot be resolved. (Good luck filtering spam with a DNSRBL if you're using OpenDNS.)
Use Level3's anycast DNS servers instead: 4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, ..., 4.2.2.6. They're faster than OpenDNS and they don't pull any of that nonsense on their users.
Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of spending money on rolling copper or fiber into less-urban areas, the providers are spending all their spare money on backbone transit for bandwidth-hogging customers' packets.
I seriously doubt that is the case because Verizon seems to have no issues with bandwidth hogs while Comcast seems to wail and moan about the issue.
Exactly. Verizon quietly spends more on keeping bandwidth hogs happy than on installing DSLAMs or whatever the FiOS equivalent is called.
The whole P2P argument seems like a straw man that points the blame on the wrong set of persons.
But it's convenient for the ISPs, and apparently the burden is on the public to get straw men like this out of the way before the ISPs can consider serving less-dense, higher-cost areas.
Exactly. That and virus. (Score:3, Insightful)
I watch the little status line at the bottom of Firefox and I've found that most of my "waiting" time is for advertisements.
The personal experience of myself and countless other users concurs : Most of the waiting is due to downloading flash monstrosities used by ads. Complete with annoying blinking title, stupid music and sometimes even embed video.
I think the web would be a much more supportable place if flash could just manage to die. ISP are always pointing to the "Torrent" scapegoat.
But probably if "Adblock plus"-like plug-ins were more popular on browsers (or even better, if content provider started to use much lighter textual ads like googe - but whom am I fooling ? this is never going to happen) the bandwidth usage would probably drop significaly.
Well, all that. And virus.
I'm ready to bet that at least 75% of times when Joe 6-pack bring his computer to technical service "because it is really slow and un responsive these days", or even more accurately (and worse) each time Joe decides to buy a new computer because the last one is starting to be a bit slow and crash-prone, the unstabilities and slowdowns are due to the computer being member of at least 3 bot nets, with a dozen of rogue process running in the background and spitting "p3n!s enl@rgmentz" mails, recording every keystroke, injecting pop-ups for "online casino and m0rtgage and hammering every IP within range trying to propagate.
That's also why multi-core CPU are going to be big hit in the near future on the desktop. Not that reading web pages and writing "lol" in MSN requires tremendous processing power. But the average users will finally be able to use their machine even with all the crap running on them.
Re:Like the man said... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Now they are talking about charging me by my usage. This is inherently fair, as you say, but since they are changing a model that they created, you should expect some resistance. Beyond that, while for most readers of this site, it is possible to see how much bandwidth you are using, it's still a pain to keep track of it over the course of a month. If they want to put bandwidth limits, and charge us by bit or byte, then they should make it very easy for us to check our usage. They could even offer some kind of incentive, akin to what a few power companies are doing, to use bandwidth at off peak times.
Ultimately, my point is, and I think the one of the person who started this chain, is that charging by bit or byte is fine, but then the onus is on the ISP to make it very clear both what my costs and usage are. If they did that, then it would be easier for us to adjust to that new model.
Re:Not so slow (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be more concerned if Timmy wasn't doing that.
>>>"poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
SOLUTION: People who use less than, say, 10 gigabytes per month, should get a $10 rebate for that month. Make granny happy & encourage others to save resources too. (Save energy; save the planet; et cetera.) Of course, that idea will never fly past the greedy corporations who enjoy pocketing $50 a month from granny even though she only costs them $10 in actual usage.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, there's a reason I don't generally go to buffets. I don't get my money's worth out of the trip, and I could go to another restaurant and get a better meal.
It actually makes sense to bill by a few definable metrics for internet usage.
1) Speed (Down or up)
2) Reliability (guarantee of speed and/or uptime)
3) Transfer
Yes, transfer makes sense. If it took you 3 hours to go 60 miles on the highway because of the bumper to bumper trucks on the highway, you'd demand something to get them off it. You'd demand more trains, or more expensive tolls for trucks, because they're using more.
The one reason I'd be hesitant about this is the lack of competition in the US internet market (which is one of the reasons for the problem in the first place). However nowhere else would you have someone who uses 100 times more of something pay the same price as someone else.
As a final thought, if everyone only paid per GB, it would be interesting. Mom and pop wouldn't mind 3-5$/gb, since their total bill would be maybe 20$, but other people would - and so most of their bandwidth would remain unused. They'd almost have to lower prices to increase demand. (or they'd strangle the internet and kill it in large sections of the US)
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>The thing is its very ambiguous how much gigabytes you're using.
Not really. A modem can certainly count how many bytes you sent or received. "Theres nothing like an odometer to measure..." Yes there is. Right there on my screen there's a little icon of two computers talking. It tells me that in the last 30 days I've sent 45 gigabytes and received 89 gigabytes.
Simple.
A fair and reasonable company would charge me by the gigabyte. Say 10 cents per gigabyte == $13.40 a month. My electric company operates on that same principle (9 cents per kilowatthour), so why can't my internet company work the same way? No reason I can think of.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:2, Insightful)
Somehow I think some people are mistaking "checking" and "controlling".
Yes, you can check how much bandwidth you used so far.
No, you can't really control it, at least if you use your connection regularly for more than "checking you bank account and then logging off".
As soon as you start using bittorrent or another P2P network (and there are actual legal reasons to do that), your computer is going to receive and send tons of packets. The funny part comes when you closed your client and you keep on receiving requests from other people who have your IP Address as a potential seeder. Even more funny when you have a dynamic IP and get seeding requests because the guy who had the IP address before you was sharing the latest American Idol album.
Similarly, if you're using an IM, chances are your client is continuously sending and receiving packets, even if you're not actively talking to someone.
Another nice case? You have a FTP or SSH server, and some idiot runs a bot to brute-force your root password.
If you're unlucky, he'll be doing this for a few hours, resulting in a lot of unwanted traffic.
There is no way to control the amount of data coming and going from your router. You can check, yes .. but apart from avoiding being connected as much as possible, there's nothing you can do to actively CONTROL it.
Re:Duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately 'The Tragedy of the Commons' does not apply in this case.
1) The resource is not technically 'shared'.
The ISP gives you a set amount of bandwidth but expect you to use only a minuscule fraction of what they give you. Typically they'll expect you to use maybe 5% of the speed of your connection for about 5% of the time in any given day. The problem with that is that it might have been representative of the connected populace during the Dial-Up Era and maybe early into the Broadband Era... However, as leisure time tends to be spent more on the internet the speed of your connection tends to get used more with things like Youtube (NOTE: A single video on Youtube can potentially use as much as 100mb or more, watch 10 videos in a day and you've eaten up 1 GB) and web browsing as someone said with flash and lots of video content now the average webpages are typically hitting about 1MB. People also spend more time in front of the monitor now and may be there as much as 10% of the day. Bittorrent users typically use 90%+ of the bandwidth 100% of the time. However, the way to deal with bittorrent is not by criminalizing it (although it may be used for copyright infringement), the idea would be to rework the protocol so it prefers to use seeds with shorter number of hops over ones with longer number of hops so as to keep bandwidth within the network which presumably keeps the ISP's own costs down. The reason the 'resource' is 'shared' is because of overselling and more overselling when users even the average user are demanding more and more bandwidth.
2) The providers somewhat brought this on themselves by advertising in such a way that people equate SPEED with BANDWIDTH.
This is 100% the ISPs own fault. They've spent so much money advertising their speeds that Joe Sixpack thinks speed is the only thing and that things are generally unlimited.
Re:Not so slow (Score:5, Insightful)
or do what smart businesses have done all throughout history: increase supply to satisfy demand. we have some of the slowest and simultaneously most expensive internet service in the world. as the richest nation in the world, and the global leader in science and technology, this should not be occurring.
check out this chart [muniwireless.com] of broadband prices around the world. then take a look at this map [bbc.co.uk] of broadband speeds around the globe.
i refuse to believe that South-Korea, Sweden, and Japan have fewer "power users" per capita than the U.S. or that they don't have file sharing in those countries. blaming the problem on consumers to try and divert blame ignores the most obvious and logical solution.
perhaps ISPs should spend less money and energy on packet shaping technology and trying to curb p2p file sharing, and spend more resources on what we're actually paying them for: internet access. i'm not paying $50/month for them to tell me what i can or can't use my bandwidth for, or how i should be using my bandwidth. if they want customers to only use their connection for web access, then they should just call themselves "Web Access Providers."
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:2, Insightful)
Another nice analogy : want to pay for the spam that ends up in your mailbox (either real or electronic)? Beause that's what you are asking for.
Re:Not so slow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:2, Insightful)
I find your attitude offensive. I have just spent five minutes scouring the OpenDNS knowledge base looking for some hint as to how to use OpenDNS without having them screw with my DNS and I cannot find so much as a single mention of the possibility. Perhaps someone of your inherent superiority finds this kind of thing "very easy", but maybe you can bring yourself to accept that for the majority of people, there is no way to avoid OpenDNS screwing with our DNS?
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an ISP of 14 years and it really troubles me that so many people don't understand what the ISP model is.
High bandwidth lines are expensive, very expensive. Almost no one could afford one for web browsing and email. So an ISP pays for that expensive line and then shares it among hundreds or thousands of people, each paying very much less than the cost what the high bandwidth line actually costs. For this to work, people must be willing to share nicely. Too many are not sharing nicely having some rediculous notion that they are actually paying for the bandwidth available to them rather than a share of the bandwidth.
We term people who can't share nicely bandwidth hogs. No ISP, no matter what they say publicly, wants bandwidth hogs on their network under the current ISP model. Why? Because they want their customers to have a good experience using their service, keep it forever, recommend it to friends and so on. Bandwidth hogs degrade that experience and cost ISP's not only money, but reputation and customers.
14 years ago the average per user usage over all customers was 50 bits per second. Now the average per user usage averaged over all customers is 20,000 bits per second. A typical bandwidth hog averages over 900,000 bits per second (on a typical DSL line) 24 hours per day.
We know to the byte exactly how much bandwidth each customer is using; there is indeed an odometer to measure the overall bandwidth usage of each and every customer. We use a Redback SMS 1800 subscriber management/router and it gives us exact figures. Cisco makes a similar unit also used by many ISP's.
There are no allotments; things don't work that way. But 10 years ago and ISP could correctly figure a user was actively downloading something 1/30 of the time, but only because they were on a dialup modem. Broadband users were downloading more like 1/1000 of the time when broadband first became available because files downloaded faster. P2P destroyed that model and raised costs hugely.
Now the problem with P2P is that it expands to fill all available bandwidth. At one time, after Kazaa first appeared we saw our lines starting to become congested, so we doubled our bandwidth. That relieved the problem for almost 10 days. Other ISP's I've talked to agree, increasing bandwidth doesn't solve the P2P/bandwidth hog problem.
I think I take exception at saying it is ISP greed; I'm more inclined to say it is a small handful of P2P users that can rationalize their theft of copyrighted material as (astonishingly) helping the people they are stealing from.
the problem is you, not the ISPs (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a problem with charging per gigabyte. The thing is its very ambiguous how much gigabytes you're using. Theres nothing like an odometer to measure you're overall useage of bandwidth.
It's not ambiguous at all, it simply takes a lot of hardware to measure.
These ISPs are SERIOUSLY overselling their network capacity to create an artificial scarcity.
Bullshit. ISPs are selling you a volume limited, high bandwidth account. They simply haven't been imposing the volume caps because it's hard and costly to measure.
In other words they're being greedy and their own actions (overselling)
No, *you* are being greedy. They could simply bandwidth limit everybody to 1Mbit/sec, charge you the same amount, and be done with it. Everybody can max out their lines.
But it's preferable to give people high burst bandwidth because it's nice when pages load fast. And it's nice not to have to spend billions on bandwidth metering when statistics say that there are only a few bad apples that try to get a maxed out line on a consumer priced subscription.
So, take your pick: for your $30/month, you can get 16Mbps burst bandwidth with an (implicit) volume cap, or 1Mbps sustained. You can pick either one. You can't get 16Mbps sustained for $30/month, it's just not economically feasible yet.
August 15th 1971 (Score:2, Insightful)
When your money devalues exponentially, it makes absolutely no sense to spend it on "quality", it makes far more sense to simply get rid of it as fast as you can on any old crap.
Wait - who's fault? (Score:2, Insightful)
So you are trying to watching streaming video, and are calling other people bandwidth hogs???
As for my online games: while they tax the heck out of my CPU & GPU, the last time I checked the bandwidth requirements were a mere trickle ... in the kbps range (though they do seem to demand low ping times).
that's bullshit, too (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I take exception at saying it is ISP greed; I'm more inclined to say it is a small handful of P2P users that can rationalize their theft of copyrighted material as (astonishingly) helping the people they are stealing from.
Although I agree with most of what you say about bandwidth, as an ISP, you have no business judging what I send across the line. Whether it is "theft of copyrighted material" or fair use is up to me and the copyright holder.
P2P and home servers are enormously important for private and personal use, as well as for not-for-profit redistribution of CC material (e.g., Miro).
As an ISP, your best bet is to shut up and completely forget about what people transmit over your lines or you open a Pandora's box.
Re:Not so slow (Score:4, Insightful)
but if you look at current trends, it seems like Americans are spending more to get less. if our rates were as low as South Korea, Amsterdam, Japan, France, Finland, etc. then i could understand the slow internet speeds. but we have some of the highest broadband prices for non-rural populations.
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be a fool. The fact that it is the default behavior is problematic enough, especially when people carelessly suggesting "Just use OpenDNS!" on Slashdot and elsewhere never seem to finish that breath with "...but be sure to sign up for an account with them, and log in to disable these features, and then install a dynamic DNS client on your computer and configure it to send updates to OpenDNS whenever your public IP address changes, otherwise they'll start hijacking your traffic again whenever you get a new IP address from your ISP."
So you tell me, why does it make any sense to recommend OpenDNS to anyone, when Level 3 and others have publicly-accessible servers that are faster and that respect users' privacy without gratuitous configuration and software installation?
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:3, Insightful)
For any other utility (water, gas, electricity), we pay by the usage. Why not this?
Maybe because the major cost isn't bandwidth, but maintaining the lines, paying salaries, etc? Also, bandwidth is increasing at an exponential rate.
I also dispute that all other utilities we pay by usage. We don't pay by usage for cable/satellite TV. We don't pay by usage for local phone service. What do all these have in common? They're all information services.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to also point out that the reason they oversell their capacity is the same reason that parking at your local university oversells parking permits... Because they can
It doesn't have an effect on overall availability assuming people are using the service in the way that they're expected to - the way normal users do - and it keeps the services utilized during hours where they would normally see far less usage.
If you get on most ISPs in the US in the late morning on a weekday, you'll find everything to be very snappy and responsive. Same with after 3am. That's because hardly anybody is using it at that time - just the "bandwidth hogs" and stay-at-home parents, kids home "sick" from school and aforementioned granny looking up her genealogy.
Not everybody uses the internet during prime-time either, so it tends to balance out... Assuming that people use the internet the way that they are expected to - not full bore all day long.
<caranalogy>Your automobile manufacturer gives you the same warranty as anyone else on the assumption that you're not driving it at 120mph in a loop nonstop on a raceway for the first 3 years of your warranty, necessitating more repairs than should be reasonably expected.</caranalogy>
Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric (Score:5, Insightful)
Democratic leaders do not lead. They listen to polls and propose nice-sounding but impractical plans. We need strong leaders who are willing to do what is unpopular if it is the right thing to do. Banning SUVs or destructive plastic products will generate cries of "oppression," but if all of humanity benefits, it is a freedom from oppression. No one can make a decision for a society at large without stepping on some toes, but as most individuals are inclined to see detail and not the whole, their desires are often inappropriate. Among our people there are those who lead intelligently, nobly and compassionately. Rigorous education in history and philosophy can round these people out, and we can start them out as local leaders and promote those that do the best job. Further, we should breed them in a special category of people, or "caste," so that we pass on the genes that produce great leaders.
To hell with that!
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not. It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario. You'll always have someone who wants to utilize a shared resource to the maximum limit, regardless of how it hurts the community as a whole. What makes it worse (in my opinion) is that most P2P traffic is driven by compulsion rather than any reasonable personal need for the content. Consider that DiVX video requires about 0.5 GB per hour. If you downloaded and watched 12 hours of video per day, every day, you'd need about 270 GB of bandwidth a month (assuming you uploaded half of what you downloaded). Note that Comcast intends to cap users at 250 GB a month.
Now ask yourself what reasonable person watches that much TV, movies, etc., every day. It makes no sense until you realize that a small minority of P2P users are compulsive data collectors. They want to have a copy of every song, every movie, every TV show, every game. They have thousands of GB of content they've never even bothered to open. We all know someone like that, and it doesn't take very many people who behave that way to utilize every bit of available bandwidth.
It's been obvious for some time that ISPs will eventually be forced to go to something like the cell phone business model. You pay a flat rate for a certain number of GB per month, then a per-GB surcharge over the cap. This will force the obsessive P2P users to throttle back and make P2P more useful to everyone, without letting it become a compulsion that brings the net to its knees.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
hey, you sell me a package as having 1meg/second download rate and I expect to have it... whenever I want, 24/7 if needs be... anything less is false advertising. If you want to be upfront about it, then sell it properly as a maximum burst speed and have a total capacity per day where I get billed per 100 megabytes over that. Oh but you won't as it would be suicide as all your customers would flock to someone else who was lying about their package...
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:3, Insightful)
thats why i use firefox with the noscript extension...
the web have become one big mashup, with videos from youtube, images from flikr and all kinds of third party data hosts are being comboed with ready to use blog templates to create the next narrow focus news page.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, that's the neatest deflection of responsibility I've ever seen in this debate. It's horse puckey, of course. :)
The problem with your whole argument is that you're acting as if the end-users have some unwritten responsibility to share nicely, rather than simply being responsible for adhering to the terms of their contract with the ISP. Bandwidth hogs certianly do use up way more bandwidth than the average (and whether or not they're using that bandwidth to commit copyright infringement is utterly irrelevant).
But the problem is that ISPs tell their users "We'll give you 24/7 access to X bandwidth, for $Y a month." Then some users use up X bandwidth 24/7 (dutifully paying their $Y a month) and the ISPs (like you) start whining "HOW DARE THEY USE THE BANDWIDTH WE PROMISED THEM!"
You do not get to say "These hogs are supposed to be sharing nicely, not using up all the bandwidth we're providing them with!" This is a business transaction, your rosy moral view of the world has nothing to do with it. It'd be nice if everyone behaved politely all the time, but they don't, which is why we have laws and contracts. That way, there's force behind agreements, so when you whine "They're using too much bandwidth" they can point at the contract and say "You said we could, right here in writing."
But you sold them X bandwidth for $Y a month. That's in the contract. If it's not a viable business model for you to sell people this (because too many of them actually use that bandwidth) then you need to change the contracts so that people are paying for the bandwidth they use.
An entirely sensible business model is to give X bandwidth for $Y dollars up to Z bytes per month, and then charge overage fees when the user goes beyond Z bytes per month. That's what ISPs are starting to switch to. But whining that some users use up too much bandwidth -- when YOU CONTROL how much bandwidth they have, and YOU DECIDED how much to give them -- is idiotic.
Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:August 15th 1971 (Score:5, Insightful)
When your money devalues exponentially, it makes absolutely no sense to spend it on "quality", it makes far more sense to simply get rid of it as fast as you can on any old crap.
So ... it makes sense to you to specifically purchase crap with your rapidly devaluing currency? Because that makes no sense to me, and even from a business point of view, if currency is devaluing, then it makes more sense to me to invest in infrastructure now, before it devalues any further.
The internet isn't really slow (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't the internet that is slow, not really. Three things have a disproportionate effect on users perception of the internet: (1) Web site load times and (2) Horrible packet management by your DSL/Cable modem for outgoing and (3) Massive packet backlogs on the ISP side of the router in the download direction, mainly due to YOUR devices advertising ridiculously huge TCP windows or otherwise not doing any management of the incoming bandwidth at all. Those three issues cover 90% of the problem space and none of them are really the ISP's fault.
* Web sites access all sorts of crap these days, mostly related to ad content. Many also run horrible javascript all over the page which slows the site way down even once the page has been loaded. Ad content sources often present a larger responsiveness issue then the site itself. Using ad site blockers will improve site responsiveness.
* Many home systems these days have more then a few devices accessing the internet. Very few of these devices do any sort of packet management or bandwidth control. The result is that your interactive traffic is not prioritized over all your other traffic.
* Most consumer (read: windows) boxes, and most cable and dsl modems either have no bandwidth management or have only very primitive bandwidth management for uplink data. They might be capable of separating out various types of traffic, such as VOIP, but they usually can't handle more then a few simultaneous connections and then only under very strict conditions. They simply do not have enough memory to buffer more then two or three packet streams.
* Programs like bittorrent will easily blow-out the downlink direction of an ISPs DSLAM or cable provider side router. It is virtually impossible to manage the downlink packet rate with a cable modem, even with the configuration options available. In fact, the many ways people use to mask bittorent traffic ends up making things worse by defeating attempts by ISPs to simply manage the packet stream (verses cutting it off).
None of these issues are really the ISP's fault. People who know what they are doing throw a unix-based (aka linux, bsd) router inbetween their home network and their cable/dsl modem. Simple QOS filtering doesn't do the job, you really need to run a full-blown fair-share sub-scheduler on top of your basic QOS separation and pre-restrict the bandwidth to move all the packet queues onto your router, for both directions. That will take care of the uplink direction at the very least.
Incoming bandwidth is harder to deal with because you often do not have direct control over the devices trying to downlink the data. The best you can do there is create an artificial bandwidth constriction between your unix-based router and the target devices in the incoming direction. This will shift the bulk of the packet backlog away from the ISP's DSLAM/router and onto your router. Your router has enough memory to deal with megabytes of stream backlog if necessary so you can control all incoming bulk data streams while letting all the interactive traffic bypass the queues.
Here's an example: Take a single TCP stream downloading a movie. If the TCP connection is advertising a very large data window, such as a megabyte, then what winds up happening is that a megabyte of data winds up getting backlogged on the ISP-side of your connection as the bandwidth is constricted down to your cable/dsl modem's capabilities. The ISP cannot handle that large a backlog, particularly if you are downlinking several things simultaneously (each with a megabyte of backlog). Traditionally ISPs have used RED or other congestion control algorithms but the plain truth of the matter is that THEY DO NOT WORK VERY WELL FROM THE POINT OF VIEW AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE END USER. It is far better to not have the backlog to deal with in the first place, at least not on the ISP side of the connection.
In anycase, the issue is more due to the many applications trying to use your pipe as if they owned the whole thing then it
Re:Not so slow (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree.
Corporate greed, along with job outsourcing, HB1 importing and illegal immigration is rapidly turning the USA into a 2nd world nation.
I pay $72/mo for a "10Mb/s" bandwidth that clocks out at 8.5Mb/s. No cable TV.
Almost fifteen years ago my city fathers decided that the Ingernet was too important a national resource to be monopolized by the cable and telcoms for profit. They decided to install a city owned fiber optic cable. Why not? We have a city owned police force, fire department and school system. A city owned local, state, national and international communication system affordable and accessible by the poorest of us was, and still is, and excellent idea.
The cable and telcos went crying to Congress about "unfair" competition and their lobbyists paid enough Congressmen of so that Congress passed a law making it illegal for cities to "compete" with cable and telcoms in furnishing the Internet. To "help" the telcoms finish the job the villages, towns and cities started Congress GAVE the cable and telcoms $200B to "finish" laying the fiber optic cables in this country. The greedy cable and telcoms immediately POCKETED the money and promptly forgot about their obligation to finish laying the cable. Classic corporate greed, approved by congress because congress included no provisions to FORCE the cable and telcoms to finish the job. That's right - there were no punishments for non-performance in that 200B Congressional giveaway.
IF the US voters had any brains, and their politicians had any ethics, they'd DEMAND the cable and telcoms FINISH the job of laying the optical cable and converting from Copper wire to fiber optics, AT NO COST TO THE CONSUMERS. Then we'd have 100Mb bandwidth and the ISPs wouldn't be able to play the "pipe" game and extort more money from consumers for "better" service. As it is, they are playing word games with Net Neutrality, and using it as justification for their extortions.
Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric (Score:5, Insightful)
Well done, thank you sir. Perhaps the solution is to do away with Slashdot's user link and only provide links relevant to the story. There seems to be nothing but corruption from these, and it leads to the likes of Roland and other terrible bloggers as well as these jerks who are trying to fish people in and raise their website hits (be it for advertising dollars or for their stupid agenda). I'm not sure that linking to a user's chosen website brings any value to Slashdot articles.
Are you willing to pay per GB? (Score:2, Insightful)
If your ISP promised to ignore the content, would you be willing to pay a fair price/GB in exchange for a correspondingly lower base rate for the first GB?
In other words, if your ISP lowered its flat-rate for average users and imposed per-GB prices that were in line with or cheaper than the first-GB price, would that be okay with you?
Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:3, Insightful)
Random script kiddies on the power grid have a hard time pushing electricity into your sockets and costing you a fortune tho.
But there's nothing preventing them from sending you a flood of packets. What was your IP address again...?
It's called Reaganomics. (Score:4, Insightful)
When every republican administration eviscerates the labor and consumer rights laws, and at the same time eviscerates the regulations which promoted actual competition, you get this kind of thing.
People work more, make less, and get fewer choices in an increasingly consolidated market.
Do you think people like to buy particle board furniture?
Of course they don't!, but they make less, and the fact that smaller suppliers are squeezed out by global particle-board furniture holdings limited means there is less choice/competition among people providing real wood.
The same can be said of pretty much every sector, and is exemplified by the broadband and media markets.
Re:Not so slow (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhhh yes. Anytime someone tries to inject some common sense into the argument, the conspiracy theories come out and allegations that someone is being bought by the "enemy". Grow up. Try to talk about the arguments instead of just attacking someone. Besides, if you could read, you would see that I was not supporting the side of the ISPS. In fact, if you weren't so busy being part of the moron brigade blindly labeling anyone that is not yelling as loudly as you are that the enemy must die, the enemy himself... you would see that what I said was a scathing indictment of their behaviors. You could only possibly misconstrue what I said, if you were in fact not trying to comprehend it all.
Far from it.
Ummmm, are you sure about that? Don't want to think about that again? How about the "initial investment" part? There have been advancements in fiber optic cable and not just the control units. To say otherwise is misinformed and naive. Of course it costs more overall to transmit data over fiber when the distances are greater. The fiber run does not stretch. Be realistic. The total runs of fiber from Los Angeles to New York COST more than a run of fiber from the north tip of Japan to the southern tip. Same for South Korea. That investment needs to be paid off, which means that they need to recoup more money, hence the cost of bandwidth must rise. It's not all that hard to comprehend. Capacity is finite, and cannot currently support 10 Mb/s for every residential user. You have to lie to them.
The capacity you seem to think exists, or should exist, cannot be realized by just a "minimal outlay" of cash. If they could increase the bandwidth that easily, they would. Those telcoms are not just selling to residential customers. They could make more money with more capacity. Now even with retrofitting the existing fiber runs, you cannot increase the capacity "exponentially". Exponentially? Are you serious? You sound like you are going to start talking about an Oscillation Overthruster any minute.
There is a capacity problem, unlimited bandwidth contracts are damaging to all concerned and the biggest source of our problem, and the last mile of copper is the least of our problems.
If they delivered a fiber optic cable right into your telco box at the side of your house, gave you a fiber optic modem and could deliver VOIP, Internet, IPTV, etc., they would NOT have the capacity to service you all at the street anymore than they are now.
If they were forced to be honest about how they can sell you the bandwidth, and you only paid for what you used and what you were guaranteed to receive, they would be forced to increase the capacity at the street. It's not as easy as you make it out to be, but it would be done. It would have to be, since over selling would be illegal and they could only add users by adding capacity.
Why are they going to increase capacity any faster than they are now, even if it just as easy as you say, when they can keep dicking with the residential users? The first step is to make unlimited contracts illegal, or at least mandatory performance requirements. None of that exists now for the consumer.
Now try saying again that I some paid stooge for the ISPS. It makes you sound stupid.
Re:Not so slow (Score:5, Insightful)
...I worked for an ISP, and the reason we oversold...
Are not many, if not all utility services oversold? If everybody flushes their toilet at once, does the water pressure in the mains not drop? If everybody picks up their telephone at once, do many users NOT get a dial tone? The electrical service of the average home is 200 amps. If every home started using that full capacity, will the electrical grid not collapse? Just last week, when about 2 million people suddenly had to get out of New Orleans. Were there are not many miles long traffic jams on at other times perfectly serviceable roads? In LA, and other large cities, are the freeways not often long parking lots during rush hour? Why should the Internet be any different? After all, it has been called the information HIGHWAY.
Is there a power company or water service that offers unlimited service for a fixed price? Is there not a water meter or electric meter on every house? Does the service company not come out periodically and read such a meter? Do the customers not get charged according to how much they use? Why then, should the Internet be any different? Every utility has only limited resources which they sell for prices the users are willing or able to pay. If your electric bill is too high, you find ways to save power.
All utilities and many other business services are scaled to average projected use. When you want to make a phone call, most of the time you to get a dial tone and there is no problem. The same is true of your other utility services. ISPs only need to and do scale the networks for average service, not the peak. They should be easily able to determine how much use there is by the average subscriber as well as the highest and lowest users. Then they can structure their prices according to use, just as any other utility does. I don't think that Internet service providers are any greedier than the average utility company.
Re:Not so slow (Score:4, Insightful)
"A packet has to travel over VASTLY LARGER DISTANCES to get from Los Angeles to New York. Plain and Simple. The US could be the leader in the world as far as Mb/s per citizen, but it would cost at least 10x the money than any other country"
Bullshit. American has 80 people per square mile. Norway has 32 people per square mile. I'm originally from Finnmark [wikipedia.org], Norways northernmost, harshest and sparsest county with 5.2 people per square mile (even Montana and Wyoming are more densily populated).
My home town has less than 3000 inhabitants and it is at least 2.5 hours drive away from any other settlements larger than 1000 inhabitants.
Yet, if I decided to move back I could order 12Megabit ADSL tomorrow.